


Sixteen Years Down the Line

by yetanotheryetagain (infinitecompositions)



Series: Maybe There's A Chance [1]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Developing Coping Mechanisms, F/M, Genderbent Reid for plot reasons, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Kidnapping, Reid is a chemistry teacher, probably the first in a series, she's good at it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 08:34:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23468497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinitecompositions/pseuds/yetanotheryetagain
Summary: A teenage girl rescued at the end of a case gives Aaron a chance to catch up with someone he thought long gone from his life.
Relationships: Aaron Hotchner/Spencer Reid
Series: Maybe There's A Chance [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1688308
Comments: 10
Kudos: 62





	Sixteen Years Down the Line

When they found her, she was glaring daggers at the door that opened, pinned against a wall and ready to launch at whoever came across her next. She was lucky they weren’t so trigger happy as one of the deputies, because she nearly took Morgan out expecting someone that would hurt her. By the time they got her to medical, Hotch had already seen something unsettling.

She looked, in many ways, like Jack. Different cheekbones, curlier hair, but they had the same brow and the same jaw. The same eye shape.

Medical found the same injuries on her they found on all the other girls the Unsub had taken, but injuries that were far older. She was his longest victim, and Hotch worried about what that meant for her. The Unsub wanted his victims to experience visceral fear before they died – something he got out of the children he abducted fairly quickly. But she was kept for months. She didn’t look at them with fear – no she looked at them with anger.

She had that fear. It showed when she didn’t think they were looking. At some point, someone taught her not to show fear in danger.

*

That the years had gone by so quickly had never escaped Aaron’s notice. So much had changed, but he had never heard another word from Agent Reid, not after he asked her to turn in her badge and gun, to go on a sabbatical and focus on her recovery, and to come back when she was ready. She never came back, and she changed numbers at some point.

His messages stopped going through.

It was these cases – when they saved some young child that was in for a lifetime of therapy – that Aaron wondered if there was anything that could have been done to help her. Reid was a sensitive soul, a gentle woman at heart. A woman with iron under her skin, but one that was liable to break before she would bend.

He wondered, often, what would have needed to be done to help her. Would someone have had to help her when she was young? See the situation she was in? Could the team have done something sooner, when they first saw the signs of addiction?

Nevertheless, the fifteen-year-old in the back of the Bureau van was glaring at him. She had been since she heard his name, and she rolled her eyes anytime someone said “Hotchner” or “Hotch”. Emily she would respond to. Any questions he asked she just scoffed. Unfortunately, Emily had gone to ask Garcia to help with digging up information on her.

“We want to help you, but we need you to answer our questions.”

“You’ll listen?” She rolled her eyes. “Mom didn’t need to say much for me to figure out you didn’t listen much before.”

Her mother – that was the first lead they had gotten on the girl’s identity. “What does your mother do?”

“A lot. She has to stay busy to stay sane, not that she’ll admit that to anyone but Darren and her therapist. She’s a chemistry teacher in Baltimore for her day job, though.”

“What else does she do?” If she was willing to talk about her mother, then he could get somewhere. Get more information to narrow down where they were supposed to take her other than Baltimore – a big enough city they had limited hope of narrowing it down by much.

“She’s got all kinds of programs for at-risk youth.” She eyed Hotch skeptically. “She posts music online, sometimes. I had to dig for it…”

She looked more into his eyes – a pointed glare that he himself was known for, and it was almost like staring into his own eyes for just a moment, if it weren’t for the hazel-green that were meeting his eyes. She had steel in her spine, just like Reid did. “Did you know?”

“Did I know what?”

“When you… Don’t worry about it.”

Her eyes had that glint – the one he knew his own got when he was trying to get a dig at an Unsub to throw them off their game and it was disturbing to see it in the eyes of a girl that young. “Mom wouldn’t want you to.”

*

A few hours later, the girl hadn’t given him much. She was the daughter of a chemistry teacher in Baltimore, but without an idea how long she was missing that was not much to go on.

She stopped answering anyone else on the team after a while. Hotch could see the fear, no fifteen-year-old could hide it that well, but that she was hiding it suggested someone coached her. The Unsub had kept her longest of all his victims, too, and he himself was a man that thrived on fear.

“You convinced Demarco to keep you for a long time – at least eight months from what we can tell.”

She looked up at him. “Over a year.”

“Over a year?”

She nodded. Something slipped in her expression, something like grief. “My mom… She has a lot of mental health stuff. She hides it really well, but…

“If I give you her name… Penelope can tell me if she’s alive yeah?”

She hadn’t met Garcia, and she had alluded to her mother as though Aaron should know her. There was something to her demeanor.

“Are you going to tell me her name?”

She stammered a bit.

“My mom…” she sighed. “My mom’s name is Spencer Reid. She moved to Baltimore almost 16 years ago, pregnant, and had me.

“I don’t think you need much more to fill in the gaps there.”

*

Emily and Morgan were in front of him, questions on their tongues before he had closed the door.

“You never told us what happened, just that Reid was going on sabbatical. She never came back – Hotch, you care to tell us what that girl knows that we don’t?”

“We need to find Reid, first. I’m sure she’s worried.”

*

Aaron sent Morgan to get her from the classroom, assuming he would not be welcome. Whatever had happened 16 years ago, the wounds from it were likely to still be deep – Morgan almost wondered if even _he_ would be welcome.

He entered the classroom from the door in the back, watching Reid – hair grown out, with a few piercings without the jewelry in them and some tattoos peeking out from under her sleeves – as she taught. She had thrown a tennis ball to a student who gave a quiet explanation of his answer before she gestured for him to come up.

“Since you’re on top of this, here’s some notes. I have to go talk to Mr. Morgan here, but something tells me you might be able to piece together what’s in here. If you can, I want you to try and explain it to everyone else.

“If you all work hard while I’m gone, I’ll bring some stuff to do a Bunson Cook-out on Friday.”

The kids seemed genuinely attached to their teacher. Derek had seen those teachers before – the type that gelled with students well and got them to focus on the topic, to enjoy it even when they found it difficult. He had never pegged Reid as the teaching type, but then he had never pegged her as the tattoo and piercings type either.

She walked out with Morgan. “What can I help you with?”

There was something settled in her that made him uneasy. It wasn’t a person settled in their current situation, it wasn’t like when someone was settled in their selves. It was like she had settled into her position with her demons as opposed to dealing with them. Derek, always protective of her, always wanting to protect her the way he protected his sisters, hated seeing it.

He hadn’t answered, and she looked at him with worry. “Derek? What is it? What case are you working on? I can help, but I need to know what you’re looking for.”

She was still willing to help, still pouring good into the world where she could. Garcia had found her community work – the music programs, sponsoring kids into arts camps and into academic programs that would help them get a leg up in the future. There was an after-school club she hosted to help tutor kids in any number of subjects that had a large membership base.

But despite getting away from their work, she was still carrying a tragedy on her back.

“You should come with me.” He gestured for her to follow. “Why didn’t you come back?”

Hotch had been tight-lipped, but that didn’t mean Reid, who had embraced herself in some sense since leaving, would be.

“I was struggling, but I couldn’t find the help I needed. When… things changed, I was in a position where I had to either find a way to make things work when I could barely keep my head above the water or I had to start over somewhere new, and see if I could make it work there.”

“You were pregnant.”

Reid stopped. “I never. I didn’t tell anyone on the team. If you know, it is because you found Morgan.”

“You named her Morgan?”

“After my best friend,” Reid swallowed. “Did she suffer.”

“She wouldn’t tell us.”

Reid swayed a bit. “She’s. Oh, god. She’s alive?”

She started crying. “She’s alive, oh god.”

Morgan put a hand on her shoulder before truly hugging her. It had been sixteen years, and Reid had been bearing thing on her own. “It’s okay, kid. She’s alive, she’s fine. She was so concerned about you when we found her, and she wouldn’t tell us a damn thing we didn’t pry out of her.”

“Is she here?” Reid separated from Morgan, looking at him with the desperation Morgan had seen on so many parents before her. “Did you-“

“She’s in the principal’s office with Hotch and Prentiss.”

Reid took off down the hall, Morgan keeping a step behind her. “Kid, kid, it’s okay. You can walk to her.”

“Morgan, she is one of the only people I have had to hold onto since I left, and she was ripped from me over a year ago. You’re telling me my daughter, my only living family, is here and I should _slow down?”_

He couldn’t necessarily argue with that.

*

Reid didn’t pay Aaron any mind, running into the office and pulling the girl into her arms. She was immediately fretting over her, and the newly named Morgan was trying to calm her down but held on just as tightly. She bore some significant similarity to Reid, but the similarity to Jack put an uneasy feeling in his gut. They had… In the aftermath of Haley they had gotten together periodically. Not romantically, per say. Reid had started struggling as things got serious, and they never explored it.

So, when she invited the team to her apartment for dinner, as a thank you for finding her daughter, he had little excuse to say no, and a very strong reason to say yes.

The apartment was small, cramped. There was a bedroom for both of them, a small kitchen and a study space that had sound dampening equipment in it – Morgan, the daughter, had mentioned Reid doing music. Potentially a way to cope with her own troubles, if Aaron had to guess.

He didn’t want to be profiling her, but he couldn’t turn it off. So much of her had changed. There was artwork with Morgan’s name written in a silver sharpie along the bottom left corner – consistently on the bottom left corner and consistently in silver sharpie – and there were books laying everywhere. Morgan seemed to relax upon entering the apartment, and Reid seemed to relax the near constant grip she had on her daughter.

Reid whipped up food quickly, and a neighbor who saw Morgan with her came in with food of her own and a loving hand to Morgan’s shoulder.

“I babysat her whenever her momma had to work. She used to work at the bars at night, until her music started selling. Her books, too. Oh, her books are good.”

“Books? Kid, you’re holdin’ out on me!” Derek threw a hand on Reid’s shoulder, laughing. “What kind of books?”

“Oh, this one can write a good mystery, but she likes science books. She has one, though, that she wrote for Morgan over there,” Carolyn, the neighbor, leaned in “And it’s just the sweetest novel you ever did read. I have a spare copy, if you want it.”

Reid shook her head, laughing. Aaron remembered that edge to her laugh. In the moment, she was laughing and smiling but she was holding back her struggles.

Reid never liked to rely on people.

As dinner finished and people started getting ready to leave – Baltimore was only an hour from DC, most of them had driven up in their personal vehicles for ease – Aaron found himself staying, helping with the dishes. Carolyn had gone down the hall to her own apartment to bring back tea for the three of them. By the time she came back, the apartment was nearly cleared out.

“So, I take it you’re Mister Hotchner.”

“You know my name?”

“I never kept your name from Morgan – by the time she was old enough to start asking questions I figured she was old enough to know the name of her father.”

“Morgan likes to talk, but she doesn’t want to hurt Spencer.”

Morgan herself had gone to sleep, worn down from the events of the day.

“I told her, I always tell her, she can come to me, but, well. Carolyn is willing to tell me when she’s worried, and as long as she’s going to someone safe I don’t mind her keeping things from me when she’s not feeling up to talking with me.”

Carolyn gave Aaron a long stare. She was older, African-American, and had the demeanor of someone who had watched life try to hand her the raw end of the deal over and over and knew enough to see through the deception. She carried herself with the strength, too, of someone who had struggled and tried to help those she could. It was little wonder she and Reid had gravitated towards one another, and if he dug Aaron was sure Carolyn would be just as active in the community as Reid was, both in programs Reid was affiliated with and with her own programs.

“You seem like a good man, Agent Hotchner. I would like to know why you left this young lady on her own.”

“Carolyn.”

“No, Spencer. I’ve watched you for sixteen years, but more than that I’ve watched Morgan, too. You two may be willing to take on the world all by yourselves, but you never should have had to. And I would like to know what convinces a man like Agent Hotchner to send his paramour away.”

“I didn’t know Agen-“ he stopped himself. He did not need to distance himself from the mother of one of his two children. “I was unaware Spencer was pregnant.”

“Would it have changed your mind?”

“I don’t know how much you know of Spencer’s past, but,” he was interrupted.

“If this is about the addiction, I know. I’ve helped her more than once when she’s been struggling, and I used to be an addictions counselor before I switched to trauma counseling.”

Reid was staring into her cup. “Hotch, just because I’m an addict doesn’t mean I was a bad parent. Or teacher. The school knows, but my sponsor vouched for me, and I’m almost seventeen years clean.”

“I didn’t mean to insinuate that you were a bad parent.” Aaron tried to catch her eyes, but Spencer was looking straight into her mug. “I just didn’t want to open the discussion to anything you might be uncomfortable sharing.”

“I’ll repeat my question. Would it have changed your mind? Would you have sent her away, if you had known?” Carolyn leaned toward him. “I want to understand, Agent Hotchner, but more than that I believe Doctor Reid needs to understand. When you sent her away, were you doing it to get rid of a problem, or did you genuinely want her to get better and come back?”

Aaron didn’t look at Carolyn, though he addressed her. He saw, instead, how Reid’s hands were shaking, how the muscles around her eyes were tense, her shoulders too. She wanted to cry, but that gentle woman with a spine of iron would not let him see her cry. She would not cry until she felt safe to do so, and Aaron had been out of her life so long that she would likely take a significantly longer time than before to trust him.

He found he wanted her to trust him again. He wished she had never lost that trust in him, but he had a suspicion that Carolyn was fairly on the nose with her assessment. Reid didn’t avoid coming back because of her struggles with sobriety – she found other ways to deal with those. No, she came back because she thought Aaron had sent her away, and even if she tried to hide that from Morgan it was undoubted that her daughter had picked up on it, which would explain the hostility when she first met him. She probably only talked to him or the others because they were her way of getting back to her mother, whom she clearly held very dear. Much like how Reid held her own mother in high esteem for as long as Aaron had known her.

“I could tell something was wrong, and when Agent Reid went AWOL during a case, I knew things were getting worse. I had hoped she would either reach out for help from the team, find help from outside, or at least find a way to cope that was healthy. However, when that didn’t seem to be the case I worried the pressure from our job was keeping her from recovering.

“I asked her to go on sabbatical because I was hoping the time and the distance from some of the worst parts of our job would give her time to deal with what was going on, or to get help. I wanted her to come back, and when she didn’t I was worried I had made the wrong decision. By that point, I was afraid calling would be counterproductive. I… I did reach out, eventually, despite these concerns.

“My calls were never returned.”

“Why did you think being isolated would help?” Reid’s voice was barely audible.

Hotch thought about his response, carefully. “I didn’t think of it like that. I was thinking only that the job seemed to be giving you so much stress, and that sabbatical would be time, and space from that stress, time and space that would let you take care of things.”

“Hotch, I needed the team. I needed the consistency, knowing that things would be what they had been.

“I came into your office to tell you I was pregnant, but you showed me the door.”

“I didn’t know, Reid.”

She nodded. “I know. But… by the time you called, I was barely holding it together and I had your child. I was finding coping mechanisms, but I didn’t want to risk having something happen, having something throw me backwards.”

Carolyn had a look on her face, a pensive one that suggested she knew this conversation could end badly, but she did not start any intervention. Taking that as an affirmation of their progress in this conversation, Aaron continued on.

“Reid, you were always welcome back. And you still are.

“If you’d be willing, I would like to get to know you as you are now. And Morgan.” Aaron smiled. “Though, I have to admit that name will make group gatherings confusing.”

Reid laughed at that. “She has a hyphenated last name. Call, ‘Morgan’, ‘Reid’, or ‘Hotchner’ and she’ll respond.”

“Spencer, I’m sorry. I was wrong to ask you to take sabbatical. I thought it would be good for you, I thought it would help you.”

Reid nodded. She started tearing up, but once again was pushing the tears aside and hiding them. “If you’re willing, I think it would be best to ease into things. Morgan, at least, is going to need time to adjust.”

Aaron could agree to that. He could agree to that, and one day he could hope that there would be room for him in hers and Morgan’s lives. That Jack would get to meet his sister, that Reid would be willing to come to D.C. with him.

But if he was to move to Baltimore, he couldn’t imagine that he would have too many problems with that.


End file.
